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by Paul William Roberts
According to the Iraqi newspaper Al- Quds al-Arabi, James Baker, the Bush family’s Mr. Fixit , recently met with one of Saddam Hussein’s lawyers in Amman, Jordan, and told him that the former deputy prime minister of Iraq, Tariq Aziz, would be released from detention by December in order to negotiate with the US on behalf of factions of the Iraqi resistance movement still controlled by old Ba’ath Party leaders. Sources in Jordan tell me that the first stage of such negotiations has indeed already taken place. Two weeks ago, Aziz was whisked from his jail cell and, along with other representatives of Iraq’s Sunni Resistance, taken for three days’ of secret discussions in Amman with senior US officials. It is heartening to note that this course of action was advised by the Atlantic Free Press three weeks ago. Aziz and his colleagues are currently discussing America’s proposals with the divisional resistance leadership, whose response and counter-offers they will present to Washington early next month.
Jordan’s Crown Prince Hassan tells me, furthermore, that Condoleeza Rice made a personal appeal to the Gulf Cooperation Council last month to act as intermediaries between the US and the armed Sunni resistance, not including Iraqi al-Qaeda leaders. Rice evidently joked during the closed-door meeting that “if Donald Rumsfeld could hear me now he would wage war against me fiercer and hotter than he waged in Iraq.”
The official wing of US Government was represented in Gulf War 2: Retreat from Iraq by George W. Bush’s security adviser, Stephen Hadley, who presented the following proposals regarding the future to Iraqi officials during his recent trip to Baghdad:
- Any initiative towards national reconciliation must now include Iraqi resistance and opposition leaders
- There must be a general amnesty for armed resistance fighters
- There must be a disbanding of militias and death squads
- Any federalist proposals dividing Iraq into three states must be abandoned in favor of a strong centralist authority combined with greater self-rule for local governors
- That oil revenues must be distributed more equitably for the benefit of all Iraqis, including the Sunnis whose region contains little of the resource
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki was evidently unable to accept
these proposals, or so I am told, because his office ties him
institutionally to the Shia parties, which view any concessions to the
Sunni as a religious betrayal. Iraqi Shia Muslims believe their moment
in history has arrived and they have finally thrown off a millennium of
Sunni domination. Most chickens still remain in their eggs, however, so
counting them may be misleading. The view in Washington is that
Al-Maliki’s usefulness has ended, and a political coup is now underway
to oust him and reorganize his regime along lines more amenable to a
revival of America’s old bias toward Sunni Arabs. In the Situation
Room, the situation always has room for change, and two opinions are
better than one even when they’re mutually contradictory.
Along with burying Al-Maliki in Quisling’s Graveyard, some of the
Pentagon’s less repentant serial killers feel that cranking up the
battle of Baghdad a notch would make an even better prelude to
withdrawal, since it might help prevent US troops being picked off like
lame antelope by a triumphant resistance.
In this, as in all Middle Eastern political poker these days, Teheran
holds better cards than Washington, Tel Aviv, Riyadh, or Baghdad. While
state media ply us with tales of Iran’s profligacy as chief arms
merchant to violent dissent, the real story is that of Iran’s
restraint. There were larger shoulder-launched missiles to supply
Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon – ones capable of reaching every city in
Israel – yet Teheran chose not to make them available. There is an
awful lot more that the Iranian military could provide to Iraqi
resistance groups, too, yet to date it is the Russians, via Syria, who
have provided most of the weaponry. Why is Iran so coy?
One could speculate that the Islamic Republic will not play its hand
until Iran’s air force includes nuclear missiles; or one could theorize
that the Iranian clergy still hopes to extend national influence into
Iraq along religious lines, without force. But no one in Iran is going
to let us see what cards his country holds because they aren’t playing
poker there at all, they’re playing chess, the national game. Among its
many shortcomings, the DC Situation Room lacks a really good chess
player --- which is a pity, since chess is all they play in there.
Israel also used to display a blistering strategic chess game, where
now all we see is a kosher ham-fisted version of checkers. Particularly
in response to the elegant gambit played from Teheran, whose President
Ahmadinejad is used like a Queen to carry out showily distracting but
inconsequential assaults into enemy terrain, while the Bishops position
themselves for far more lethal operations.
The real power in Teheran is an oligarchy linked to oil and interwoven
with senior clerics yet essentially secular in its goals. Your media
don’t bother you with this reality, however, for reasons best known to
themselves. To retain the status quo, however, the oligarchs must
placate the impoverished masses with a myth of spiritual warfare in
which Iran fights for God against Satan. God has just awarded one of
Iran’s citizens the deeds to Satan’s embassy in Teheran in lieu of a
cash payment for the fine imposed by a clerical court for wrongful
imprisonment – so the war is going well! At least no one in Teheran’s
corridors of power actually believes this yarn, though, while
Washington is infested with religious psychopaths who seriously (or
rather comically) think they’re up against a guy with horns who has set
himself up as the Competition.
Of all the sins in existence, letting a human mind confuse fantasy with
fact is right up there at the top. These are the same people, one ought
not to forget, who want God included in science courses where the Bible
will also be chief text. And they wonder why they are on a collision
course with militant Islam --- not over basic principles, of course,
but merely the choice of text? Hinduism didn’t thrive during the Indian
version of the Spanish Inquisition either, and the late Pope only
apologized for the Holocaust a year before he died.
WE INTERRUPT THIS TO BRING YOU A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR:
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RETURN TO AN INSTITUTION OF LEARNING IMMEDIATELY IF THIS IS THE CASE,
BECAUSE YOU MAY POSE A SERIOUS THREAT TO YOURSELF AND OTHERS. OUR MOTTO
IS ‘THINK BEFORE YOU ACT, AND BEFORE YOU THINK, LEARN HOW TO THINK.’ YOU KNOW IT MAKES SENSE.”
WE NOW RETURN TO SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING.
President Ahmadinejad is not just a man of the Iranian people, he may
well be the only man anyone in Qom has met who has actually worked for
a living and possesses no kind of inherited wealth. The trouble with
studying nothing but the Holy Koran is that, while you learn much about
maintaining tyrannical power, you learn nothing about obtaining it in
the first place. I have no doubts whatsoever about Ahmadinejad’s
loyalty to the Iranian masses, but I am not so certain about his
loyalty to the clerical powers that be. If he felt the military were
behind him, he would mata his own shah
in a trice, I think, and seize the reins of absolute power from a
corrupt oligarchy that has betrayed Iran’s revolution for its own ends.
He makes Machievelli look like Madeleine Albright: after all, the
princely adviser never states that an eminence grise is obliged sometimes to give advice he knows is wrong in order to seize power himself…
Good help is hard to find, however, and a good adviser is sometimes
worth the risk that he will stab you in the back --- until he does, of
course. Since good advice is almost as rare as honesty in Washington,
it would not surprise me if the Al-Maliki putsch incorporates a US plea
for help to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most influential
Shia cleric, who will have to weigh carefully his debts to Teheran
against the lure of real political power in Baghdad.
Washington has accepted it is not in any position to call the shots in
Baghdad any more, yet that will not mean it won’t try to call them. One
major condition of the deal under which US troops will withdraw from
Baghdad (but only to their desert bases) is that Iran does not try to
extend its sphere of influence. Since Iran alone has the power to make
sure this deal goes through, the best that US negotiators can do is get
an agreement that Iran will not try to extend its sphere of influence immediately.
This, and making sure Saddam isn’t released from jail, is all that
victory amounts to these days at mission control in the home of the
brave. But, as King Lear noticed: “The art of our necessities is
strange and can make vile things seem precious.” Tariq Aziz was never
an especially vile thing, yet his negotiating skills must seem precious
beyond price in the big house on Pennsylvania Avenue.
If I were Aziz, though, I’d assure myself a glorious page in the
history books by insisting that pride of place be given to President
Bush at the Grand Baghdad Banquet of Humble Pie, with George, Dick,
Donny and Wolfo all helping to cut that first big slice, as they write
checks handing back to Iraqis what they stole from them during the 21st
Century’s Greatest Crime So Far. But Mr. Aziz is far too good a
diplomat for such a ploy. Besides, he spent the first few months of his
captivity in Room 31 at Baghdad International Airport crying real tears
over his involvement in Saddam’s more notorious excesses. How good his
negotiating skills are, though, remains to be seen --- after all, he
couldn’t negotiate his own exile during the fall of Saddam’s regime,
and was thus forced to surrender unconditionally to US authorities.
Good to hear he’s out on probation, though: three years is more than
enough time for what he did. Indeed, his greatest crime is being
Saddam’s oldest friend and most loyal ally. I wonder what the status of
that is now?
The day America admits it no longer produces diplomats able to hold
their own in a serious global match will be the day it might be allowed
back into the world community with observer credentials. Henry
Kissinger was a better butcher than he was diplomat, but at least he
knew how to sit down and deal. As Saddam Hussein will tell you ---
since The Godfather
is his favorite movie – when the other mob leaders think Sonny has
taken over the family, they start a war. Putting John Bolton in the UN
is like making The Terminator President: a very bad idea someone in
Washington will always be enamored with until an even worse idea occurs
to them.
Paul William Roberts’ latest book is the political novel Homeland,
which has been called “the darkest and most depressing work of fiction
ever written.” [Shurely this title goes to George W. Bush’s
autobiography?-Ed.]
Baker is also an erstwhile secretary of state and was US ambassador to
Kuwait, a post in which he found no conflict of interest with his
extensive business connections to Big Oil in Houston.
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